A symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) architecture generally is a multiprocessor computer architecture where two or more identical processors can connect to a single shared main memory. In the case of multi-core processors, the SMP architecture can apply to the CPU cores.
In an SMP architecture, multiple networking CPUs or CPU cores can receive and transmit network traffic from a large number of access points. Generally, each access point and/or client in the network will need to be properly authenticated by the network. Such authentication may involve a multi-step process, e.g., including at least step 1, step 2, and step 3 for each access point. On a highly scalable platform, it is possible that when a large volume of authentication requests are handled by the system around the same time period, a significant number of requests will not be able to complete through all of the steps in the multi-step process. Thus, those requests will have to be re-transmitted, and their corresponding clients will need to renegotiate the authentication process, i.e., going through the same multi-step process again from the very first step.
Therefore, it is very important for the system to have a mechanism that ensures initiated authentication processes complete prior to committing to new authentication processes. A conventional solution involves discarding any new authentication requests or returning a busy message, if there are any existing incomplete authentication processes have been initiated, so that those existing authentication processes have a better chance to complete without suffering downgraded system performance from accepting new authentication requests. However, having no knowledge and visibility of the real-time system load and/or capacity, the clients whose requests are discarded or declined will re-transmit the same request at a random future time. Moreover, it is possible that when the requests get re-transmitted, the system is still busy and still cannot commit to the new authentication requests from clients.